GZMB Summer Symposium

The Göttingen Center for Molecular Biosciences (GZMB) is a joint initiative of more than 30 research groups of different faculties of our university. It arranges a summer fest every year, which involves a colloquium with talks from scientists from Göttingen, and also guests from other universities, and social get together at a big barbeque.

The opportunity to be heard by scientists as a student was great for us, and the excitement was big. Moreover, also students from various different biological disciplines were there to listen to our presentation, and asked a lot of questions we answered.

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Master Interview Day (24^th June 2016)

At the interview day of our master program Microbiology and Biochemistry, the new applicants visit the involved institutes to have an interview with the professors as part of the selection procedure.

They also get insight into different departments and get to know the location and the laboratories. During this event, we presented our poster to the future Master students from our program. Moreover, we answered any questions the future students came up with. The interest was huge. Besides presenting them our project, we mainly intended to get them interested in the iGEM competition to make sure that Göttingen can provide an iGEM Team in 2017.

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Newspaper

We made contact to the the local newspaper here in Göttingen, and they indeed wrote an article about us. Nowadays, newspapers must of course be online supported for a great outreach. We were really happy that this newspaper article was also our most succesful post on facebook this year, with over 2,500 people reached.

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You can read the whole online article here.

Bio&Pretzels

Since 2014, the student council of our faculty organizes so called Bio&Pretzel talks, in a semi-formal atmospherere with beer and pretzels. The speaker, usually a professor or assistant professor, gives insight in his scientific field for a general audience: school students, freshmen of the university, relatives of the students, but also for ongoing scientists themselves. The aim of these talks is to inform the general audience, but also to give insights for ongoing scientists still looking for their scientific profession. Thus, it was a great honor for us as the iGEM team to have this opportunity. We talked about synthetic biology in general and the awesome applications which might be possible in future, and of course the responsibility which comes with it. We also outlined the idea of the iGEM competition, and presented our own topic. We told the audience about the importance of Vitamin B12, from which nutrients it can be uptaken, and how we could improve the efficiency of production with our synporter.

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Our talk was received very well by the audience, and numeral questions from the scientific fraction were asked and answered. Probably the most important non-scientific question of the evening was, if, as beer is also containing a lot of vitamins, beer would be a good source of vitamin B12. Sadly, we had to clarify that a human would need to drink 100 L of beer per day – which we do not recommend at all for a healthy and balanced nutrition.